Quandaries: The Twosome

Well, the Super Bowl on Sunday was a quandary to me. First of all, I really don’t know what is going on, and secondly, I’m never the guest I want to me at one of these Super Bowl parties. I figured out the opposing teams only two days before the event. I talk too much. The men generally dislike me. (Yet I noticed that a Baptist minister at this party seemed downright grateful for my presence. Nothing like good huddle over the Trinity between plays.) For one, I find the ads far more exciting than the game itself and have this maniacal gift of getting people “off” the game and “onto” discussions of consumer psychology, with your basic cheer of—“Let’s guess what product this ad is promoting!!” They either love me or hate me at these parties. My fan base is mostly women but I noticed that my good friend, Chica, chose to sit up close to the new flat screen and gazed intently on the “plays” as if she really knew what was going on. Maybe she did. In any event, she didn’t fall into the trail mix or slide into the Nachos from that position. Nevertheless, when I went to bed Sunday night thinking that the Patriots had won (left after the pizza at half-time), I was surprised to find out that the New York Giants were celebrating the next day. This Dewey-Truman scenario replayed itself even more, poignantly, when it took my Korean student at the American Language Center, who has been in this country a mere month, to explain to me today (after having skipped class for the Downtown parade) the final twists and turns of Sunday’s game. Unfortunately, I haven’t grasped the language enough to re-explain the upset.

Another quandary was my over-fifty liberal’s nightmare of indecision in the voting booth on Super Tuesday—whom to vote for? For the first time in my voting-booth life, I found myself explaining to the people from the League of Women Voters, that I just might vote for Obama instead of Clinton, even though my first allegiance is to Hillary-Hopefully-
The-First, but “instinct or vestigial optimism might just trigger that button for Barack,” I rattled. I think they actually pushed me through the curtain and yes, I voted for Hill, a vote for womanhood, experience, and her Girl Scout Spirit of indefatigability. I’ll be happy if she wins, but for some strange reason my mind replays Obama’s words from the last democratic debate. When Clinton responded to a question from Wolf Blitzer by stating that we can not just sit down and talk with our “known enemies,” Obama replied, “Why not?” This, I hope, resonates as the biggest, most momentous debate of them all.

M.